Kitchens are the most expensive room to redo in your house. When you move, you’ll have to learn the workings of a kitchen that was designed with somebody else in mind. If you’d like to refresh your kitchen, but you don’t have the money to completely redo it, here are some tips you can do yourself to make the space feel more personalised to you.
Here’s what our kitchen looked like when we moved in. It’s a really lovely, big space & it’s what sold the house to us.
And here’s a picture of what it looks like now. I’ll go into more detail about what we’ve changed further down in the post, but from the offset, you will notice the colour palette has changed from red to grey and pink (although you can’t really see the pink in the picture below).
The Tiles
The tiles were the first thing we changed. I think you have to really love the colour red to have it in such a prominent position in your home, and we don’t feel strongly about it.
The tiles were in perfectly good condition so instead of retiling, we decided to paint over them. There are a number of tile paint options in B&Q but we opted for the V33 Loft Grey Satin, £22. This is an excellent tile paint and I’d recommend it to anybody. I’ve just bought it again in white for my next project (the bathroom).
It took three coats to complete this space and one pot of tile paint was enough. We could’ve left it all grey (we were tempted) but we decided to use a white grout pen to grout in between each tile. These pens are amazing. It took two pens to grout the tiles and also all the tiles on the floor. You’ll notice in the first picture I put up that the floor tiles needed a bit of revigorating, and these £4 grout pens did just the trick. Mine will probably need doing again in the next 6 months, I think it’s a good habit to get into.
Plants
Plants can make a real difference to a room. They’re a fairly inexpensive way to brighten up your kitchen space. I think they’re especially useful if you’ve got white walls, because they add a bit of colour and personality.
I like to have a mixture of real plants and fake ones. It just means that when I can’t be bothered to go and get fresh plants, I still have a selection of fake ones to fill the space.
Fox Faux Plant Flower Shop on Etsy has some nice flowers. You can pick up a bunch for around £6 which is great for faux flowers. If you have a bit more money to spend, Cox & Cox have a beautiful selection of faux plants. And, if you don’t have any money to spend on flowers, just go and pick some. I made some lovely bunches with some wildflowers I found in a field last year.
I also like to keep the windows clear of curtains. It’s nice to be able to see out and let as much natural light into the kitchen as possible.
Cabinet Door Handles
The cabinet doors and door handles can make such a huge difference to a kitchen. If you’ve got wooden cabinet doors but they’re not to your taste, you can easily sand them down and paint them to look so much better.
For us, we decided to change out silver cabinet handles for black, modern ones. We can’t paint our doors – and they’re fairly non-offensive anyway – but this small upgrade makes so much difference to the overall feel of the kitchen.
The ones we bought were t-bar shape steel handles in matt black. We got them from G. Johns for £2.45 each. Remember to measure your handles before you get them. We seemed to have universally popular handle sizes, but you should double check beforehand.
You can see from the picture above just how much difference they make. They match the work surfaces a lot better and it gives a high-end feel to the finish.
Final Price
We spent:
Paint: 22.00
Grout Pen: 4.00
Faux Flowers: 6.00
Cabinet handles (x28): 68.00
TOTAL: £100
Are you thinking of making some minor upgrades to your kitchen space? Please let me know – I’d love to see them!
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